VLC for Windows 8 Metro at 90% of target, gives details on development challenges and benefits

The Videolan team have posted an update on their KickStarter page after their fundraiser hit 90% of their £40,000 target with 7 days still to go.

Standing at £36,615 at the time of writing, the team explained their plan to port VLC from Windows 8 Desktop to Windows 8 Metro, needed because the Windows ecosystem was moving in that direction, required portions of their code to be rewritten to meet Windows Metro ideals of responsiveness and the ability to wake and sleep as needed. Because VLC is an open source project the code will be re-usable by other projects making the same jump.

Why am I excited to work on this port? This KickStarter will give us the opportunity to work full time on WinRT for a few months, and solve all these challenges for us, but also for other open source projects. We already know how to create a compatibility layer for different operating systems, so we will be able to build one for WinRT. We could also come up with guidelines on using free software toolchains to build WinRT applications.